A Political Education

By

Ralph Gardner Jr.

Nov. 5, 2012 8:52 p.m. ET

After getting fired from my first job out of college—as a "desk assistant" at NBC's local news affiliate in New York—I retreated to Middlebury College in Vermont, my alma mater, to lick my wounds, do some skiing and mooch off friends' meal plans.

It wasn't more than a few days into my open-ended vacation when I returned to a friend's dorm room where I was staying and discovered an urgent message to call my father in New York.

He told me that the 1976 NBC Presidential Election Unit, at which I'd ambitiously applied for a position before I was fired, was calling with a job. (Apparently, it was unaware of my dismissal from another division of the network under less than favorable circumstances.)

ENLARGE

Roan Conrad, right, with his brother Kent, now a U.S. senator, and their Aunt Ursula in an undated family photo.
Conrad Family

The election unit itself had also earlier turned me down via a polite letter from its political director, Roan Conrad. He explained that there were only a few positions available and that he'd selected people with more experience. If anything opened up, he'd let me know.

It was the kind of gentlemanly rejection one would assume is final—that no additional jobs would become available, and even if they did, one or two of the 50 people ahead of you on the waiting list, and with better connections to boot, were going to get them.

Furthermore, my political resume was thin, to say the least. I'd majored in political science, spent a semester in Washington—where I'd worked as an intern in then-Rep. Ed Koch's office—written a few columns for the college newspaper when I returned to Vermont and served as a campus stringer for the New York Times.

When I reported to Roan's office, my parka still dusted with fresh powder, he confided that one of the things that had appealed to him about my resume was a hobby I listed: collecting antique bottles retrieved from 19th-century dumps.

I've brought this up to my daughters recently when they've had to write resumes, suggesting they shouldn't be afraid to mention mildly quirky things about themselves. It may be what distinguishes them from the pack.

They haven't taken my advice, and not because they have no quirks. I think they believe that the person who hired me way back when probably wasn't your typical boss. And they're right.

Roan's obituary popped up on Sunday—he died on Oct. 13—when I did an Internet search of his name while writing a column about election night rituals. In that column, I reminisced about my memorable season at NBC, covering the 1976 campaign.

If you were going to be involved in only one election, 1976's was as good as any. The primaries were exciting, with Jimmy Carter coming out of nowhere to defeat a strong field that included Mo Udall, Henry Jackson, Jerry Brown and Frank Church. The Republican race was even more interesting, President Gerald Ford not locking up the nomination against former California Gov. Ronald Reagan until the first ballot at the Republican National Convention in Kansas City. (Perhaps my only scoop ever started on the way back to my hotel room, when I tripped across the Florida delegation trying to initiate a "Draft Reagan" movement for vice president.)

I lost track of Roan after I left NBC; unfortunately, mine was a temporary job, only through the elections, and I failed to secure a permanent position. I'd heard he was involved in the successful first U.S. Senate race run by his younger brother, Kent Conrad, in 1986. (A brief statement released by the senator's office said that his 72-year-old brother died of cancer.) And when I searched Roan's name a few years ago, I discovered that he was working in Washington, as the director of the Office of Sustainable Development and Intergovernmental Affairs at NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

It struck me as an unexpected career turn after his 14 years supervising NBC's political coverage, in part because Roan seemed the antithesis of a government bureaucrat. I recall him telling me that he was wary of using things like credit cards because he didn't want to leave a paper trail that allowed the government to intrude on his privacy.

In a long obituary in the Bismarck Tribune—Roan came from a prominent North Dakota family and served as a newspaper editor there and as president of the North Dakota AP before to moving to Washington to work for Congressional Quarterly in the mid-1960s—I learned that he had an impressive European stamp collection (perhaps he saw in me a kindred collecting spirit). He was also an opera buff, attending more than 2,000 performances in 23 countries over 50 years. He donated his opera memorabilia to the Library of Congress.

ENLARGE

President Gerald Ford Gerald R. Ford during his 1976 campaign for re-election.
David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images

I discovered other things I hadn't know about him: He lost both parents in an automobile accident when he was a teenager, and he was a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, Stanford (Phi Beta Kappa) and Harvard, where he got a master's degree in history.

When I told my wife about Roan's death—she may have vaguely recognized the name as someone I'd once worked for—I surprised myself by breaking down. Part of it was self-interest, in a sense: This was someone who'd given me a great opportunity a long time ago. But I like to think it was more than that.

I wouldn't go so far as to call Roan a mentor—he could occasionally be prickly and remote, and he was probably too brilliantly eccentric to be a good role model. But for someone fresh out of college who was breaking into journalism, you couldn't ask for a better, more idealistic, egalitarian boss.

On one occasion, he took me along to lunch with Allard Lowenstein, a one-term congressman who was better known for starting the "Dump Johnson" movement in 1967. (He was murdered in 1980 by a mentally ill gunman who had been a volunteer on his earlier political causes.)

I vividly recall the lunch, mostly because Roan and Al's conversation about the political landscape that year was so far over my head. Each of them seemed to have encyclopedic knowledge of every presidential and congressional race going back to the Cleveland administration.

As a wet-behind-the-ears kid, it made me realize how much hard work and homework one had to do, and how essential was experience, before you could call yourself a pro, probably in any field, but particularly in politics at the national level.

Another recollection was of the election unit's bittersweet valedictory lunch after the November elections, when my colleagues and I knew we were going to be canned. Roan went around the table celebrating each researcher's talent and hard work, and predicting great things. I held my breath until he reached me, waiting to hear what my future held.

"And Ralph," he said, "you didn't make any enemies."

I was disappointed at the time that Roan couldn't think of anything more inspiring to say. But in retrospect, perhaps he knew something about the way the world works that I didn't. On this election eve, I remember him fondly.

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